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- ...before the auto factories & the freighters & the pink, chemical nights; before anyone had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a model T...
- I am 9 years old and holding my father's meaty, sweaty hand.
- I knew her as a colorful, older woman. Sourmelina of the precarious cigarette ash. Sourmelina of the indigo bathwater.
- with a laborer's dark complexion
- root beer-colored brick
- Jimmy Zizmo knew so many things I don't know where to begin
- Standing on the dim porch, he wore an inexpensive suit & a shirt with a pointy collar that had lost most of its starch. His frizzy black hair gave him the wild look of the bachelor he'd been for so many years, and this impression was heightened by his face, which was rumpled like an unmade bed.
- he spread his flannel-shirted arms, snapped his fingers, dancing in his work boots...
- they lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in only one color, and where no one knew them.
- the streetcar showed up first as a hum in the soles of his boots.
- inside, men stood arranged in groups by language. faces scrubbed for work still had soot inside the ears, deep black
- but in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
- ...Desdemona was suffering the homesickness that has no cure...
- a radiator sighing, clanking
- but what humans forget, cells remember
- someone knocked at the door. Zizmo, who has an inexplicable aversion to unannounced guests, jumped up & reached for his coat.
- for 2 days now, her sense of smell has been incredibly acute. foods are beginning to smell funny to her, feta cheese like dirty socks, olives like goat droppings...
- ...could never get used to the polluted air of Detroit.
- a new aroma wafting in on the brisk sea air: a humid odor of mud & wet bark. land. New York. America.
- Hierarchies exist everywhere but especially in locker rooms.
- The air is stuffy in the way only air at school can be stuffy.
- ...forsythia in bloom, elms greening...
- the abundant paraphernelia of a widow abandoned on earth
- ...had ever inhabited such a problematic body
- ...the last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we are chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time"
- I climbed out of the green bowl of the field-hockey field
- on sunny days, the lake still managed to look blue. most of the time, however, it was the color of cold pea soup.
- I was born twice
- ...on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960...
- Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other.
- ...a swimming pool turned me into a myth...
- I've left my body in order to occupy others
- at 57, with her short, squat figure and intimidating hairnet, my grandmother was perfectly designed for blocking people's paths.
- ...in the sour odor of the parakeets; and in my grandparents' own particular aroma, of mothballs and hashish
- every Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruously vital head of wavy hair. he was not interested in children.
- their engagement, which coincided with WWII, had been a chaste affair. (...) she didn't surrender until after Japan had.
- it was her belief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which it had been created
- but it was difficult to hold a jewelry box in your hand without opening it
- meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited.
- ...she asked with studied nonchalance
- the congregation stood and sat. in the front pew, my cousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleopatra, fidgeted.
- his shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.
- ...Desdemona became what she'd remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body.
- ...and understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, over anything else.
- her body was a constant embarrassment to her. it was always announcing itself in ways she didn't sanction. in church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when she picked fruit, Desdemona's feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab, confining clothes.
- Desdemona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and confidant, her co-discoverer of shortcuts and monks' cells. early on, the emotional sympathy she'd felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she'd sometimes forgot they were separate people. as kids they'd scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed creature. she was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed house at evening, and whenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.
- his clothes smelled musky; smoky, and sometimes sweet.
- though physically mature, Desdemona's body was still a stranger to its owner
- ...but she wasn't conscious of it. it was her body that did it, with the cunning and silence of bodies everywhere.
- ...Desdemona understood all this and so had said nothing.
- "I don't like eating alone!" she shouted, to no one.
- ...performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying. as the beads clicked together, Desdemona gave herself up to them.
- "At the hash den on the seashore, where I'd go every day," Lefty sang along, "every morning, bright and early, to chase the blues away"
- his pockets (empty) made no sound.
- ...and my grandmother wept silently because she was going to spend the rest of her days counting worries that never went away...
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +